OmniNote Final
OmniNote Final
Team members
Introduction
I’m sure you’ve heard of the Vietnamese saying: “Nét chữ là nết người” - the handwriting reflects the hand who
writes. As we grow older, most of us don’t have the habit of keeping our notes organized, so we carelessly write
on a corner of a page, only to forget where we had written it on. Moving to an ipad or laptop, although not
convenient, helps digitize our notes and archives them in a much more systematic manner, but it is slowly driving
our handwriting culture towards extinction. In the era of technology, we learners need a medium that combines
the best of both worlds: analog and digital.
In recent times, popular productivity apps like Notion, Obsidian or OneNote are facing criticism for either:
Of course the superior options are digital notebooks like those from Lenovo and Kindle, but they’re too expensive
of an investment for the average student who simply wishes to digitize a handwritten note.
With these features, OmniNote guarantees to offer a simple and convenient digital note-taking experience,
developed by a Vietnamese team who are passionate about preserving the individuality of handwritings and
enhancing learners’ efficiency. Our slogan is: “Find what you want, whenever you want it.”
Next, please welcome Khánh who will walk us through the overview of OmniNote.
OmniNote Overview
One notable feature is our folder hierarchy and spaces. Like Windows Explorer, users create multiple folders and
subfolders to categorize your notes in a systematic manner. Moreover, users can navigate through different spaces
like School or Work.
Canvas, inspired by Kosmik and Miro, is basically a whiteboard that visual learners will love. It allows users to
create notes anywhere on the screen and organize their ideas in a much more flexible way, removing the
constraints of line-by-line typing. With tools like brushes and highlights, they can freely draw, write, and
highlight important sections of their notes.
Canvas can also function as a PDF reader: users can annotate directly onto PDF documents and cut out pages as
needed.
Plain text
Plain text, inspired by Obsidian and Google Docs, is a text editor stripped down to its most basic functionalities.
When the user creates a plain text file, standard Markdown formatting will be applied to the headings and bullet
lists, so they can jump straight into writing without having to go through a tedious format setting process just to
make it look good.
In both Canvas and Plain Text, we also give users the ability to create custom handwriting fonts that will be
applied to typed texts to add a personalized touch and make the documents appear more lively.
Tools
Hi, I’m Khánh Hà, and if there’s one thing to take away from our pitch, it’s that the tools from OmniNote are
made to maintain the flow of learning.
After the user scans a paper, if AI-phabet detects an overall low confidence level, it will ask the user to pick a font
out of the top 3 that is the closest match to the handwritten text captured, in order to account for every
handwriting style, pretty or ugly, and accelerate the text extraction process.
(A glimpse of OmniNote’s handwriting library)
(Inspiried by Photoshop: Keep ink lines, remove background; change ink color, AI upscaling)
I’ll pass to Thanh Huyền to explain the next.
PenPal, inspired by Grammarly and Google Translate, is like a friend that helps you with your writing: it suggests
new words and phrases you can use in your text, and corrects your grammar if requested. PenPal can translate and
summarize any given body of text; it answers issues you need to resolve and records your feedback.
We also notice that: when you want to find answers to your questions, you have to exit the note-taking app to
enter another app such as Qanda, Studocu, or any other online websites; this disrupts the workflow. So we figured
that, if you select the region on your canvas that contains the question and ask PenPal, it will launch a search in all
of these sources and retrieve all the findings in one place. This not only saves time for users but also helps Qanda,
Studocu, and knowledge sharing websites expand their reach.
Next, Khánh Hà and Thanh Hải will discuss some bright visions that we’ve planned for OmniNote.
R&D Roadmap
[KHA] Market campaign
- Integrate with many apps for convenient files import and export: Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Photos,
OneDrive, Microsoft Office 365.
- Hire developers specialized in training a custom model for cursive handwriting recognition.
- Collaborate with other foreign developers to expand to other languages: Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc.
- Collaborate with organizations which specialize in knowledge sharing to integrate with PenPal: QANDA,
Studocu, Vietjack, etc.
[HAN] Conclusion
To conclude, with the concepts that our team had put our whole hearts in, we hope that the technology behind
OmniNote will eventually enter the everyday life of users, and its impact will ripple across many generations.